Currently, when you upload your content (whether it is photos, videos, or your band's music) to Facebook you must grant the company a license to use your work inside the social network. This is similar what happens when you upload a video to YouTube: you grant them a license to show your videos on the site. But what is unclear on Facebook is what, exactly, your friends and the rest of the world can do with your work. Some people don't want anyone using or sharing their work. That's OK. But Creative Commons is designed to help everyone else tell the world how they want their work to be shared and reused.

If Facebook adopted Creative Commons licenses, you could tell the world that you're OK with your photos being used for non-commercial purposes, but that users must give you attribution. You could even say that commercial purposes of your content are alright. It's all up to you, because you own the copyright to your work, not Facebook. This is why CC offers 6 different licenses that span the middle ground between "All Rights Reserved" and the "Public Domain." Our licenses range from Attribution only to Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. To learn about all of our licenses, visit this page:

Many sites such as Flickr and Wikipedia support Creative Commons licenses as tools to empower users, and there are now over 140 million CC licensed works already published on the web. Isn't it time for Facebook join the club and let users share their work?

Windows of opportunity

As Mark Zuckerberg said February 18th: "If you'd like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we've created—Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I'm looking forward to reading your input." ref: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130